Commentary
The country is no stranger to waves of emigration. But a geo-economist sees in the latest wave – of its moneyed elite – a vote of no confidence in its economy.
Indians have always been great migrants – just as they have been welcoming of people arriving from distant lands.
Aug 26, 2025
Since 2016, the largest source of immigrants to Canada has been India. After Brexit, South Asian nations led by India sent the most numerous immigrants to the United Kingdom.
Australia once preferred immigrants from Britain and Ireland. Around the turn of the century and until about 2010, the Chinese led the numbers. Latterly, it has been Indians who have been the top immigrants.
Why do so many Indians leave India? The South Asian giant, now the world’s largest by population, has a briskly expanding economy. Its people have wide access to the world, thanks to a booming aviation sector that’s reaching Tier 2 cities – flights to Singapore’s Changi Airport alone number 290 a week – and an increasing number of countries offering them visa-free entry or visas on arrival.
From Himalayan glades to beaches to wildlife sanctuaries, there’s so much of the country to enjoy. Hindu and Buddhist pilgrims have plenty of spots to visit. And if shopping is your passion, both classy local and foreign designer labels are easily available. Ditto, if you are looking for rejuvenation therapy.
What then is it that India cannot offer that makes emigration such a cherished goal, even for its elite classes?
The truth of the matter is that Indians, particularly from the coastal areas, have always been great migrants – just as they have been welcoming of people arriving from distant lands. An old saw has it, for instance, that when Neil Armstrong and Edwin Aldrin landed on the moon, they were approached by a man from Kerala who ran a tea shop there.
A common word for Muslims in that south-western Indian state is moplah, a corruption of mapilla or son-in-law. Why so? Because Arab traders seeking the state’s rich spices had brought Islam to the state in the 7th century, and some fell into the practice of taking local wives.
When Islam became the dominant West Asian faith, Muslim Arabs and their local descendants came to be called moplahs.
Conversely, according to the United Arab Emirates’ official statistics, Indians today are the largest expatriate community in the emirates.
Elsewhere, even as Turks and Persians arrived in ancient India from the north-west, rulers in the south-east of the land sent expeditions into what are now Sri Lanka, Indonesia and Malaysia.
The structured Indian emigration though is a modern phenomenon – one that has gained attention as a phenomenon that has helped shape economies and societies abroad.
The first large-scale organised migration took place under British rule when indentured labour was sent out as far as Fiji in the Pacific and Trinidad in the Atlantic. A second wave took place in free India, when the Gulf nations started booming in the 1970s following the discovery of oil. A third phase arose shortly after “professional middle-class” engineers and doctors moved out to developed nations such as the UK and the US.
The Indian diaspora now extends to 210 countries and
overtook the Chinese diaspora a decade ago in terms of spread and density.
In his latest book Secession Of The Successful, Dr Sanjaya Baru, a geo-economist and former media adviser to the late prime minister Manmohan Singh, examines this phenomenon, including how attitudes towards emigration have shifted both in government circles and intellectual circles.
Half a century ago, he points out, celebrated economists such as the trade guru Jagdish Bhagwati of Columbia University fretted about the “brain drain” from India. But in March 2024, External Affairs Minister S. Jaishankar, speaking in Singapore, offered a different perspective, noting that India’s burgeoning relationships with Singapore, the US and UK would not have been the same without what he referred to as the “diaspora factor”.
“An expansion of the global workplace is to India’s benefit,” Dr Jaishankar went on to say. “It is not something which is to India’s detriment.”
Dr Baru is on firm ground here. Indeed, with job creation proving to be such a challenge domestically, India seems to have a far more relaxed view of emigration.
A person who is closely linked with the employment issue says the government’s strategy on non-farm job creation could be loosely described as resting on three pillars: promoting entrepreneurship that leads to self-employment, a little over a third of the workforce absorbed by the organised private and public sectors including the military and bureaucracy, and a smaller chunk of the semi-skilled and highly skilled that the state hopes could be profitably placed overseas.
Continued access to H-1B visas for Indians, as Dr Baru points out, often figures in US-India bilateral discussions.
It is the current, fourth wave of Indian out-migration that Dr Baru identifies – that of the children of the wealthy, and in many cases the power elite themselves – that must concern India. At home, they constitute a privileged class, but the future of their families is no longer tied to the future of India.
According to a Morgan Stanley report that he cites, some 23,000 Indian millionaires had left the country since 2014, the year Mr Narendra Modi came to power.
A survey by Kotak Mahindra Bank suggested that one in five high net worth individuals it had contacted across a dozen cities had plans to move their home base overseas. In 2024, an international consortium of journalists and data miners reported that Indians were the largest property-owning foreign group in Dubai – 29,700 Indians owning 35,000 properties.
NRIs or non-resident Indians, he points out, using the widely used term for overseas Indians, have become non-returning Indians. The number of Indians renouncing their citizenship touched 206,378 in 2024, soaring from 85,256 in 2020.
What drives this? According to Dr Baru, acquiring a global footprint for their business may be one reason, and social pressure from wives and children to live in more comfortable climes is possibly another.
But there’s a third reason that’s relevant for India’s economic future: seeking shelter from excessive taxation and intrusive tax administration at home.
Indians now account for close to one in 10 of all golden visa holders worldwide.
Among the Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development countries, Indians top the list of new immigrants with 407,000 of them entering OECD countries in 2021.
Henley and Partners, an international consultancy that advises the wealthy, says 4,300 Indian millionaires moved out of India in 2024 – with UAE as their top choice, overtaking Singapore.
Only the UK and China topped those numbers for emigrating millionaires. While Singapore has attracted more of the professional upper middle-class and children of the Indian power elite, Dubai has attracted more of the business elite, notes Dr Baru. Either way, India’s metropolitan elite are running scared.
“All of them are running away from the Delhi Darbar, which is now increasingly arbitrary, intrusive and opaque and manned by a bureaucracy that has its roots in less developed small towns and conservative Hindu India.”
The issues that emerge from Secession Of The Successful raise questions for both India and the countries that receive Indian emigrants.
Let’s start with India. Anecdotal evidence confirms that perceptions of an intrusive tax regime are indeed a key impetus for the flight of the elite. But Dr Baru fails to give adequate recognition to why this is so.
Indians are notoriously reluctant taxpayers even as they like to whine about their poor public services. Second, to the Indian government’s credit, the tax administration has been streamlined considerably; refunds, for instance, are impressively prompt.
But along with this has come the increasing ability of the Indian state to both soak up data on individuals and cross-connect this information. This, really, is what has caused the sense of siege among the wealthy.
Dr Baru captures a part of the irony, though. While their business leaders seek high tariff walls to keep out competition, he notes drily, they also demand a liberal regime to move their wealth out.
What does this capital flight mean for India? And should this movement of money be begrudged when Indians overseas remitted home a record US$130 billion (S$167 billion) or so in 2024?
“Such flights need to be treated as a vote of no confidence in the medium-term outlook for the Indian economy,” Dr Baru told me in a phone conversation.
“Last fiscal year, outward Indian FDI (foreign direct investment) exceeded FDI inflows to India. The flight of human and finance capital at this stage of India’s development can by no means be good for India. The pity is that over the last 25 years, we have simply come to accept it.”
What of the recipient nations? For the most part, Indian settlers have contributed greatly to their lands of adoption and assimilated without compromising on their Indian identity. Along the way, they have gained a reputation for being a law-abiding community and one with deep family values.
In the US, for instance, highly qualified Indians have not only contributed knowledge power, their skills have heightened American competitiveness and the global success of US corporations.
Their reputation for good citizenship in fact opened new doors for them, and second-generation migrants have even obtained trusted public positions.
That’s in part because unlike, say, a China that is thought to have tapped its diaspora for its strategic ends, the Indian government has not really sought anything much from them except the remittances they send home of their own accord.
Founding prime minister Jawaharlal Nehru would in fact remind overseas Indians that they should seek to integrate into their host countries, a message I recall the late prime minister Narasimha Rao repeating in late 1994 at a community event in Singapore.
Likewise, says Dr Baru, then Prime Minister Atal Bihari Vajpayee told the inaugural Overseas Indians Day in 2004 that those who take up foreign citizenship should stay loyal to their host country and integrate with its society.
Secession Of The Successful also draws attention to latter-day developments that governments everywhere will study closely.
Dr Baru warns that the growing public assertion by Indians abroad of their religious affiliation and social and political mobilisation based on such affiliation have contributed to concerns about overseas Indians mixing religion and politics.
“Hindu nationalism” in the home country is impacting host countries that are themselves battling challenges to multiculturalism and religious pluralism. This, he says, has long-term implications for how Indians are viewed. Ironically, he adds, proponents of global Hindutva rarely if ever seek to return to India.
Indians overseas must pay heed. The broader Indian community would do well to emulate the example of their Parsi brethren who, as Singapore’s former foreign minister George Yeo once pointed out, carry a reputation of “sweetening the milk that is their host”.
It would be feckless on their part, for instance, to import the faith-based politics of the home country into their adopted ones. In countries like Canada and Australia, this has become a serious issue – enough of a worry for governments to even consider curbs on Indian migrants.
Whatever the reasons – I am inclined to think pride in India’s resurgence, the ease of communication and real-time access to information about the mother country are facilitating a sort of dual mental citizenship that helps the migrant stay engaged with events both at home and in India simultaneously – Indian migrants will thrive if they are better residents of America, Australia and Singapore.
